Question

I’m trying to write a python script that sends a query to TweetSentiments.com API.

The idea is that it will perform like this –
Reads CSV tweet file > construct query > Interrogates API > format JSON response > writes to CSV file.

So far I’ve come up with this –

import csv
import urllib
import os

count = 0

TweetList=[] ## Creates empty list to store tweets.

TweetWriter = csv.writer(open('test.csv', 'w'), dialect='excel', delimiter=' ',quotechar='|')
TweetReader = csv.reader(open("C:\StoredTweets.csv", "r"))

for rows in TweetReader:

    TweetList.append(rows)

#print TweetList [0]

for rows in TweetList:

    data = urllib.urlencode(TweetList[rows])
    connect = httplib.HTTPConnection("http://data.tweetsentiments.com:8080/api/analyze.json?q=")
    connect.result = json.load(urllib.request("POST", "", data))
        TweetWriter.write(result)

But when its run I get “line 20, data = urllib.urlencode(TweetList[rows]) Type Error: list indices must be integers, not list”

I know my list “TweetList” is storing the tweets just as I’d like but I don’t think I’m using urllib.urlencode correct. The API requires that queries are sent like –

http://data.tweetsentiments.com:8080/api/analyze.json?q= (text to analyze)

So the idea was that urllib.urlencode would simply add the tweets to the end of the address to allow a query.

The last four lines of code have become a mess after looking at so many examples. Your help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

I’m not 100% sure what it is you’re trying to do since I don’t know what’s the format of the files you are reading, but this part looks suspicious:

for rows in TweetList:
    data = urllib.urlencode(TweetList[rows])

since TweetList is a list, the for loop puts in the rows one single value from the list in each iteration, and so this for example:

list = [1, 2, 3, 4]
for num in list:
    print num

will print 1 2 3 4. But if this:

list = [1, 2, 3, 4]
for num in list:
    print list[num]

Will end up with this error: IndexError: list index out of range.

Can you please elaborate a bit more about the format of the files you are reading?

---

Edit

If I understand you correctly, you need something like this:

tweets = []
tweetReader = csv.reader(open("C:\StoredTweets.csv", "r"))

for row in tweetReader:
    tweets.append({ 'tweet': row[0], 'date': row[1] })

for row in tweets:
    data = urllib.urlencode(row)
    .....